Sam Altman

2023–2026 · changed view

“I love that you asked them together, because I think they're super related. I think the economic transformation will drive much of the political transformation here, not the other way around. My working model for the last five years has been that the two dominant changes will be that the cost of intelligence and the cost of energy are going, over the next couple of decades, to dramatically, dramatically fall from where they are today. And the impact of that, and you're already seeing it with the way you now have like, you know, programming ability beyond what you had as an individual before, is society gets much, much richer, much wealthier, in ways that are probably hard to imagine. I think every time that's happened before, it has been that economic impact has had positive political impact as well. And I think it does go the other way too, like the socio-political values of the Enlightenment enabled the long-running technological revolution and scientific discovery process we've had for the past centuries. But I think we're just going to see more. I'm sure the shape will change, but I think it's just long and beautiful exponential curve.”

2023–2026 · changed view

“So I want to be very clear. I do not think we have yet discovered a way to align a super powerful system. We have something that works for our current scale called RLHF, and we can talk a lot about the benefits of that and the utility it provides. It's not just an alignment, maybe it's not even mostly an alignment capability. It helps make a better system, a more usable system. And this is actually something that I don't think people outside the field understand enough. It's easy to talk about alignment and capability as orthogonal vectors. They're very close. Better alignment techniques lead to better capabilities, and vice versa. There's cases that are different, and they're important cases, but on the whole, I think things that you could say like RLHF or interpretability that sound like alignment issues also help you make much more capable models, and the division is just much fuzzier than people think. And so in some sense, the work we do to make GPT-4 safer and more aligned looks very similar to all the other work we do of solving the research and engineering problems associated with creating useful and powerful models.”

2023–2026 · changed view

“People talk about like how many jobs is AI gonna do in five years and the framework that people have is what percentage of current jobs are just gonna be totally replaced by some AI doing the job? The way I think about it is not what percent of jobs AI will do, but what percent of tasks will AI do and over what time horizon. So if you think of all of the like-five second tasks in the economy, five-minute tasks, the five-hour tasks, maybe even the five-day tasks, how many of those can AI do? And I think that's a way more interesting, impactful, important question than how many jobs AI can do because it is a tool that will work at increasing levels of sophistication and over longer and longer time horizons for more and more tasks and let people operate at a higher level of abstraction. So maybe people are way more efficient at the job they do. And at some point, that's not just a quantitative change, but it's a qualitative one too about the kinds of problems you can keep in your head. I think that for videos on YouTube, it'll be the same. Many videos, maybe most of them, will use AI tools in the production, but they'll still be fundamentally driven by a person thinking about it, putting it together, doing parts of it, sort of directing it and running it.”

2023–2026 · changed view

“First of all, you can't ask it anything. That's very nice of you to say, but there's a lot of things that it's still embarrassingly bad at. But even if we fixed those, which hopefully we will, it doesn't continuously learn and improve. It can't go get better at something that it's currently weak at. It can't go discover new science and update its understanding and do that. And it also kind of can't — even if we lower the bar — it can't just sort of do any knowledge work you could do in front of a computer. Even without the sort of ability to get better at something it doesn't know yet, I might accept that as a definition of AGI. But the current systems — you can't say, like, hey, go do this task for my job, and it goes off and clicks around the internet and calls someone and looks at your files and does it. And without that, it feels definitely short of it.”

2023–2026

“When I was a kid, I assumed that there were always some adults in the room. Someone had a plan. Someone knew everything that was going to happen. Someone had it all figured out. And I sort of think why people like conspiracy theories is it's nice to think that someone's got a plan. It's nice to think someone that, you know, has it all figured out. And then I got a little bit older and I sort of started to suspect there are no adults in the room. No one, people have plans. I have plans, but no one has all the answers. No one knows where it's all going to go. And now that I am the adult in the room, I can say with certainty, no one knows where it's all going to go. Like, I'm the guy in the room and I have some guesses and I have some plans, and we're working really hard. But like, you know, we try to always say what we think the possibilities are, what we think is most likely. Often we're right. Sometimes it's in the broader set. And sometimes it goes in a totally different direction than anything we thought. And you know, we keep trying to make progress, figure out more. We try to tell people, not just tell, we try to show people by like deploying these systems and say, "You can go use it. Don't just take our word for it. Try it out. See what it can do."”

2014–2026 · changed view

“Before we jump in on the how, I want to talk about why you should start a startup. I'm somewhat hesitant to be doing this class at all, because you should never start a startup just for the sake of doing so. There are much easier ways to get rich, and everyone who starts a startup always says — always — that they couldn't have imagined how hard and painful it was going to be. You should only start a startup if you feel compelled by a particular problem, and that you think starting a company is the best way to solve it. The specific passion should come first and the startup second. In fact, all of the big successes we have at YC followed this.”

2023–2026 · changed view

“We started off just thinking we were gonna be a research lab and having no idea about how this technology was gonna go. Because it was only seven or eight years ago, it's hard to go back and really remember what it was like then. But before language models were a big deal, this was before we had any idea about an API or selling access to a chat bot. It was before we had any idea we were gonna productize at all. So we're like we're just gonna try to do research and we don't really know what we're gonna do with that. I think with many new fundamentally new things, you start fumbling through the dark and you make some assumptions, most of which turn out to be wrong. And then it became clear that we were going to need to do different things and also have huge amounts more capital. So we said, "Okay, well, the structure doesn't quite work for that. How do we patch the structure?" And then you patch it again and patch it again and you end up with something that does look kind of eyebrow raising to say the least. But we got here gradually with I think reasonable decisions at each point along the way and doesn't mean I wouldn't do it totally differently if we could go back now with an oracle, but you don't get the oracle at the time.”

2025

“No, and I don't think they seem alive. But I understand where that comes from. They don't do anything unless you ask. They're like just sitting there kind of waiting. They don't have a sense of agency or autonomy. The more you use them, I think the more the kind of illusion breaks. But they are incredibly useful.”